In the teaching of art one of the most basic skills to be taught is drawing. The teaching of drawing is often difficult because untutored individuals who are learning to draw, young and old alike, have difficulty perceiving the world around them in terms of the two-dimensional notation which is characteristic of the art of drawing. Beginners tend to see their surroundings three-dimensionally and are unable to easily transpose their three-dimensional perception of these surroundings into the flat two-dimensional form of a drawing on a piece of paper. The present invention is directed toward assisting individuals to perceive their world two-dimensionally, a mode of perception that facilitates drawing performance. All the same time this invention helps them to perceive inter-relationships between the various components which make up the subject(s) they intend to draw.
From an historical standpoint, the invention described here is a modern extension of a device which was in use at least as early as the 15th century. In those early days attempts to draw objects in perspective led people like Filippo Brunelleschi(1377-1466), Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519), Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), and others, to experiment with grid frames through which they viewed their subjects. Vincent Van Gogh(1853-1890) and other of his 19th century contemporaries used such grid frames. Van Gogh is known to have used a large cumbersome grid frame made of rough wooden timbers to which he attached heavy fiber ropes in the form of a fixed grid pattern. By observing the subject he wanted to draw through the grid pattern of the ropes he had stretched across his crude grid frame, he was able to carefully study the characteristics of his subject as isolated by the smaller discrete increments defined by the grid pattern through which he looked. In this way he was able to compose, draw and then paint many of the subjects for which he later became famous.
The invention described here, unlike its primitive predecessors, is an improved and portable art tool. It allows for the convenient and continuous adjustment of grid strings which make possible an infinite variety of grid string patterns and shapes that assist users to analyze and then draw the subjects that interest them.